Simplicity as Virtue: an analysis of Johnjoe McFadden's Ockham's Razor

Abstract

The book by McFadden, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey, United Kingdom, comes at a good time and I consider it of special interest for the field of humanities. It is a good time because the field is full of complexity, relativism, plurality, postmodernism, etc., which take as values ​​the exact opposite of what is exposed in the book as the foundation of science. It is a good time, therefore, because simplicity is already seen as a defect, a vice, when in fact it is the greatest scientific virtue that we have been able to find in several thousand years, as the work argues. Ockham's razor, formulated by the Franciscan friar William of Ockham (1287 - 1347), states that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, encouraging the search for simpler explanations for the observed phenomena. McFadden's central argument that "less is more" is presented as a counterbalance to the conceptual overload of relativist and postmodern currents. The defense of assumption economy, based on both philosophical principles and probabilistic methodologies (such as the Bayesian approach), illustrates how science benefits from choosing less ad hoc theories. McFadden accurately traces Ockham's influence on the evolution of scientific thought, connecting it from the beginnings of astronomy in Mesopotamia to the advances in modern physics and biology. Thus, we can infer from the book that it is the key to what Bilate (2024) considered key to academia: finding an ethics for our academic production.